


expect the impossible again

by goldilocked



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen, Mentioned Number Five | The Boy, Mentioned Reginald Hargreeves, The Hargreeves (Umbrella Academy) Need a Hug, Young Allison Hargreeves, Young Diego Hargreeves, conspiracy theories about your missing brother as a coping mechanism, diego voice: guys i swear i saw five vent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:54:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26615533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldilocked/pseuds/goldilocked
Summary: Five is the kind of stray that doesn’t come home, and Allison is the kind of thirteen-year-old that knows better than to keep the posters up.
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves & Diego Hargreeves
Comments: 13
Kudos: 60





	expect the impossible again

**Author's Note:**

> i don't even go here but holy shit season 2

“He’s probably hiding in the vents,” says Diego in the library, one month and three days after Five has gone missing.

Allison swears her power must actually be self-restraint, because she manages not to roll her eyes. Ever since Grace brought them that DVD of Mission: Impossible II— _expect the impossible again—_ for rainy days, which are what she calls the times Reginald’s mouth draws itself into a bloodless line as he twists the key sharply to lock his study, as if he's imagining it's their necks, Diego’s been enamoured with the idea of crawling through vents. It took the combined efforts of herself, Luther, _and_ Klaus to deter him from marching up to Reginald and declaring his career change from superhero to spy. He might not shut up about flared takeoffs and return air drops, but Allison has no designs on letting her brother get himself strangled.

Even her patiently explaining this to him wasn’t enough to stop him from trying to go through the grate in the kitchen. Though Diego claims Grace had to drag him out, bold and struggling—spies and superheroes both understand that ninety percent of people moved to secondary locations never come back—all the siblings know the truth: Grace looked at the removed grille, looked at Diego, who had valiantly pushed his head in up to the ears, and sighed, and promised not to tell Reginald about this particular escapade if Diego put the grate back lickity-split.

In any event, the failure only tempered Diego’s conviction that that’s where Five went: somewhere he can hide. Somewhere he can watch. Somewhere he can say, “This disc will self-destruct in ten seconds,” and walk away without looking at the explosion.

Allison heaves her own Grace-pulling-a-boy-out-of-a-vent sigh now. If this _were_ a movie, conversations like these—full-family affairs, in that silver-screen universe, not hushed exchanges between stacks of Russian literature—would be held over the dinner table, words swallowed up by uninhibited chatter and the clinking of china. But this isn’t.

Besides, the dinner table has Reginald You-May-Call-Me-Sir-But-Not-Father, so she decides this is better, actually.

Never ungluing her eyes from Tolstoy, Allison hisses out of the corner of her mouth, “You could barely fit your head in. There’s no way he’s in the vents.”

“Yeah, but that’s my natural athletic build. Five’s skinny.”

“He’s not _two-dimensional.”_

“Okay, fine. Since you know so much about this, maybe he has a secret power, one he never told us about. Super climbing-through-vents-like-a-badass.”

The dichotomy of Diego: everything is either badass—taekwondo, butterfly knives, Five’s hypothetical vent-infiltration skills—or lame. Ties, lemon merengue. People who take assigned reading seriously.

“I wish your secret power was shutting up so I can read,” Allison snaps.

“Lame,” proclaims Diego, swinging his legs over the table; deliberately, so he can remove them in the blink of an eye if they hear the approaching tap-tap-tap of Reginald’s shoes. “If I had a secret power, it’d be mind-reading, so if someone was like, ‘What am I, a mind reader?’ I could be like, ‘Actually, _I_ am, so ha.’”

“Telepathy.”

He frowns at her. “Rude. And uncalled for. And _rude.”_

“You might want to consider revising your stance on reading,” Allison advises him.

“Did I mention rude?”

Allison turns her focus back to her book. She’s halfway down the page before Diego shifts, leaning back in his chair to stare at the golden cornice. For all his talk of lean muscle, he has yet to hit his growth spurt: Allison stands several inches taller than him. The carefully tended hope in his dark eyes as he glances at her reminds her that, shared birthday or not, she’s his big sister.

"Do you think Five’s coming back, Allison?” he asks quietly, and Allison hesitates.

Once, late at night, when the full moonlight spilling around the edges of her curtains made sleeping a chore, she stood on her tiptoes on her bed. Cool air from the vent on the ceiling ruffled her nightshirt as she whispered into it, _“I heard a rumour that you came home.”_

Nothing happened, except the next day, the MISSING; $50 REWARD posters for the spotty dog with the sad eyes vanished from the telephone poles outside the Academy, so. That was that.

Five is the kind of stray that doesn’t come home, and Allison is the kind of thirteen-year-old that knows better than to keep the posters up.

“I hear they’re making another Mission Impossible movie,” she says.

Diego falls silent. “That’s badass,” he says after a moment, because speaking in code is another thing spies know how to do.

If Five is out there somewhere, Allison is sure he understands.


End file.
